Dark Wiki:Style Guide
This is a draft style guide for contributors to the Dark Wiki, intended to help maintain consistency of tone and terminology across articles and especially within them. Creation, credit, and references As with all Fandom wikis, original work is preferred, and all material is considered to be released under the CC BY-SA Attribution-ShareAlike license. If material is quoted from another site, it must be cited and linked appropriately, and should be limited to a few sentences. Direct copy-and-paste blocks of text are likely to violate copyright, even if cited, and will be removed unless explicit permission is granted by the owner of the copyright. Language and locale Dark is a German show with German writers, and there is a German-language Dark Wiki for German speakers. This wiki is intended for English-speakers, however, so all original content should be in English. Quotations from other languages should include a translation. Foreign terminology used inline should be italicized, whether in main text or in a parenthetical, except where it has been lexicalized into English. For example, * Nietzsche's eternal recurrence (German: Ewige Wiederkunft)… * Martha experiences déjà vu, and Jonas jokes that it must be a glitch in the Matrix… This wiki targets standard American English, principally because the initial contributions have all been made by AmE speakers, but also considering U.S. viewers are likely to constitute the largest proportion of native-speaking viewers and contributors, and Netflix is a U.S. company. As such, orthography, date format (month-day-year), and terminology should reflect American usage. Tone and style * This wiki should serve as a reference for the show. This is not to say articles should be overly formal; rather, they should be accessible to a broad audience, but strike a dispassionate tone. * Articles should be factual, and written in the third person, refraining from personal judgments or opinions. * Theories and speculations should be limited to sections specifically designated for them. * Profanity or obscenities should only be used in the context of a direct quotation. Naming Generally, articles should be titled in Sentence case according to their most commonly-used English variant. This variant cannot always be determined easily, and any proposal to rename an article should be discussed first and consensus achieved. Variant names should be provided somewhere n the introduction to the article and boldfaced along with the primary name. For example, * Cesium-137 or Caesium-137, represented as Cs-137 or 137Cs, is a… * Hannah Kahnwald (born Hannah Krüger) is the… Locations For the most part, using common nouns is sufficient to identify locations, even if they have an official in-universe name. As the formal names are not commonly used in dialogue, may not be translated consistently, and may not add any useful information, using generic names like "hospital" or "high school" is better for discovery and linking, especially because most English keyboards lack easy ways to enter umlaut characters. Thus, * library rather than "Stadtbücherei Winden" * church and graveyard instead of "Pfarrkirche St. Christoph (Winden)" Two key articles on the site, Winden Nuclear Power Plant and Waldhotel Winden, do not conform to this guideline. They may be renamed in the future, but being two of the oldest articles on the site, their renaming will likely involve the assistance of a bot. People Articles for characters, as well as cast and crew, use the full name where available. Within an article, however, the link text may be simplified to simply a given name or family name as may be appropriate, e.g. Elisabeth as opposed to Elisabeth Doppler. The sort order for categories should be set to family name first, given name second. For characters known by multiple names, links should preferably use redirects. For example, link to the redirect Mikkel Nielsen directly rather than to Michael Kahnwald when writing about the boy from 2019. This facilitates the future development of the wiki, as separate articles may be warranted in the future, and it is useful to know which links are for, say, 2019 Jonas Kahnwald, and which are for Adam or the Stranger. Episodes Episode articles use the official English titles as provided by Netflix, although the German title should be included in the infobox. For inline text, surround the episode name with quotation marks and link it to the episode article. Do not use italics, all-caps, or other mechanisms to set it apart. For references, use the template. Concepts and phenomena There has been no active discussion about what terminology to use to distinguish, for example, the time travel passage in the cave as opposed to the portals that open up in the bunker or through the use of the apparatus. Seek feedback on the name before renaming any article. Links Use wikilinks to point to articles on the Dark Wiki, elsewhere on Wikia/Fandom wikis, or Wikipedia. Use inline external links sparingly. It is only necessary to link a term on its first appearance. Too many links clutters the text and makes it difficult to read. At the same time, in a lengthy article, additional links help break up the text, as well as facilitate serendipitous browsing. There is no firm limit which requires that those links be removed; contributors should be judicious. External links * Wikipedia Manual of Style * Chicago Manual of Style style guide